The Water Main Break; Water Main Break Engulfs Grand Central's Subways

By CALVIN SIMS

Published: October 18, 1991

An 87-year-old water main ruptured outside Grand Central Terminal just before the morning rush hour yesterday, unleashing a deluge that ruined a newly renovated subway station and plunged commuters into a snarl of flooded subway lines and pulverized asphalt.

The 20-inch main, which runs east and west along 42d Street between Park and Lexington Avenues, broke at about 5:45 A.M. Water surged upward, heaving 42d Street into a small mountain range, then cascaded down staircases and ventilation grates like so many waterfalls, flooding the subway tracks below. The repair process was delayed for hours because the city's Environmental Protection Department misidentified the site of the rupture and shut off the wrong main.

Several million gallons poured out of the broken main before it was finally shut. Elevators and escalators short-circuited in the Grand Central subway station, recently refurbished at a cost of $22 million, and new metal drop ceilings collapsed. Within an hour, water in some subway tunnels had reached the level of the platforms, and 10-token bags bobbed on the waves inside waterlogged, abandoned booths. A Vulnerable System

City officials said the disaster illustrated the vulnerability of the city's 5,760 miles of water mains, not only to the ravages of time but also to the destructive power of the ever-present urban hubbub: rumbling subways, grinding trucks and the pulsing snarl of the ducts and cables that compete for space under the streets. [ Page B4. ]

After the water main break, service on the Lexington Avenue IRT -- one of the system's busiest lines -- the No. 7 Flushing line and shuttle trains that run between Grand Central and Times Square was suspended at 6 A.M., seriously complicating the travels of 250,000 subway riders, transit officials said. Angry Commuters Stranded

Angry commuters from the Bronx and northern Manhattan were left stranded on 86th Street in the morning, wandering about and crowding into hastily mobilized buses, jostling for taxis and trudging through the rain.

Shuttle service resumed later in the morning. Transit officials said last night that local service on the Lexington Avenue line was restored at 10:46 P.M. in both directions, but was bypassing the Grand Central stop. They said they expected that express service would resume before the rush hour this morning, but that more time was needed to get the No. 7 line back in service.

Environmental Protection Department officials said late last night that the water main had been repaired and that it was being cleaned to permit the flow of water to resume. The officials said they still had not determined what had caused the main to burst, but added that metallurgists had taken samples to trace the cause.

Some political leaders and city and private engineers have said that the city has not been aggressive enough in replacing its antiquated sewers, water mains, roads and bridges and that if more was not done, the city would become immobilized in traffic jams that result from disasters like yesterday's.

"This city is crumbling right before our very eyes, and no one is doing a blessed thing to stop it," said Judith McDonald, a 34-year-old computer programmer from Floral Park, Queens, who was turned away from the Grand Central subway station by police. "Why doesn't somebody do something to prevent this from happening?"

Many residents and businesses in the area surrounding Grand Central were without water for most of the day because the Environmental Protection Department initially turned off the wrong water main. Traffic was especially heavy throughout the East Side, especially in the vicinity of Grand Central Terminal, where 42d Street was blocked off between Third and Fifth Avenues and Lexington Avenue was closed between 41st and 44th Streets, two main thoroughfares, for most of the day.

Transportation and water officials said that they hoped to restore water to all residents by last night.

But the officials said that sections of 42d Street between Park and Lexington Avenues would remain closed for at least a week as workers completed repairs on the water main and that service on the Flushing line would terminate at Queensboro Plaza until crews could remove the large amount of water that had flowed into the tunnel the No. 7 train uses to cross the East River. 'I Just Want to Go Home'

Many commuters expressed outrage over the city's handling of the water main break. "It took me two hours to get to school this morning," said Tonia Garcia, 25, of Manhattan. "I missed two classes and now I just want to go home. They put the shuttle buses on two different routes. I got on one at 125th at 7:30 and I got off at 14th Street at 10. We just went from traffic to worse traffic."

Bus service, while running, was too overloaded for John Vega, who was traveling from his night job as a data processor to his day work with the Postal Service in the Bronx. He pointed to a bus so crowded that no one could board when it stopped at 86th Street. "I'll have to walk it. Forty blocks."